Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Nest’s transition into the broader Google brand portfolio could honestly be going a bit better. For its part, Google has promised that it will keep adding compelling software features into the ecosystem, and this morning’s announcement is a pretty good start.

The company just announced the addition of a package-detecting feature for Nest Hello users with an active Nest Aware subscription. The feature, which starts rolling out to users today, will use the doorbell camera to track package pickups and deliveries.

Among the more interesting bits here is the ability to draw “Activity Zones” in order to distinguished those places on one’s doorstep or porch where packages are usually delivered. This leverages an existing Nest Aware feature that works as follows:

Activity Zones can have your camera send alerts and mark your video history timeline when there’s important motion in the zone. You can set up your own custom zones, and in some cases, Nest will even do the work for you by automatically creating a zone over a spot we think you’d find interesting so alerts become more specific and meaningful.

When packages are delivered and picked up, Next Aware will send a notification. The app will note when the feature is live, and users can opt to turn it on or off. Per Google:

To get the most out of the feature we suggest users check that packages can be seen in Hello’s video stream and ensure the spot is well-lit. If not, you may need to install a wedge to change Hello’s angle (a complementary wedge comes with the device), or remove the object that blocks the package from Hello’s view.

It’s the plight of the early adopter. A few years from now, there will be a new version of the console — one that works out the biggest flaws of the original, most likely at a lower price point. Having used Nintendo’s latest console a fair bit since its launch three years back, I can say without hesitation that the Switch Lite is exactly the one I’d buy now.

Granted, I’m not a typical gamer by any stretch. My relationship with the industry could be described as casual at best. Oh, and I don’t have a television. Yep, I’m that guy… and have been for a while. Point being, the Lite appears very specifically tailored to my needs. Really, the bigger question at this point is which color?

The Lite is $100 cheaper than the original Switch, a feat it accomplishes by removing some of the console’s more innovative features, including the ability to dock and play it on a TV. The solid state body also removes the shakable Joy Cons from the equation.

The console is notably smaller, too, with the 6.2-inch touchscreen getting scaled down to 5.5 inches. It’s not a huge change, but it’s certainly noticeable. On the upside, the smaller footprint means a lighter (as the name implies) device, down to 0.61 pounds from 0.88 pounds. If you’ve spent any time playing the original Switch, you’ll notice the difference right away.

Like the newfound portability, I actually welcome the solid state design. I’ve basically played the Switch exclusively in handheld mode and have always found it annoying when the Joy Cons accidentally detach mid-game. As for those games that required a hearty Joy Con shake, that functionality is addressed in various ways, depending on the title. There’s an accelerometer built into the hardware here, so in many cases the player will end up shaking the whole console to accomplish this.

As FCC filings have confirmed, the battery is smaller on the Lite, but the smaller screensize negates that to some degree. A stated three to seven hours is a bit north of the original switch’s 2.5 to 6.5 hours — though still a fair bit less than the 4.5 to nine hours on the new model. Those numbers are game-dependent. Nintendo says the Lite should get about four hours playing Breath of the Wild, for example, versus the new Switch’s 5.5 hours.

That’s definitely a bummer. As someone who’s interested in the Switch primarily as a travel companion, battery life has always been my chief complaint with the original model. It would have been great if Nintendo would have made battery a bigger focus on the Lite. There are understandably some limitations due to the smaller footprint, but I suspect the company could have squeezed a bit more life out of it here.

The addition of an honest-to-goodness D-Pad on the left side is a nice touch, too — and hopefully an indication that a lot more NES/Super NES classics are about to come to the console. My aging self will be spending a lot of money on downloads if that ever happens.

The color choice is surprising, but quite nice. The yellow and turquoise pop quite nicely, while the gray is considerably more understated — insofar as a Nintendo portable console can be understated, that is. I honestly went back and forth trying to choose one, but if I had to pick tomorrow, it would probably be the turquoise.

At $200, the Lite is $100 cheaper than the standard model and a no-brainer for those who find it difficult staying in one place. It arrives September 20.

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This post goes out to a special group of early-stage hardware startup founders — the procrastinators, the vacillators and the last-minute decision-makers. You have just 24 hours left to submit your application to compete in the Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen on November 11-12. The application window closes at precisely 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 28. Apply right here, right now.

The Hardware Battlefield — sibling to our Startup Battlefield pitch competition — is your chance to launch your startup on a world stage in front of some of the hardware industry’s most influential VCs, technologists and journalists — and win a $25,000 equity-free prize. It won’t cost you a thing to apply or to participate, and an opportunity like this doesn’t come along every day. So, what are you waiting for?

TechCrunch editors look for the best of the best, and they’ll vet every qualified application before choosing 10-15 startups to compete. If you make the cut, you’ll have six rigorous weeks of free pitch coaching with our Battlefield team. When the big day comes, you’ll be ready to put your best pitch forward to a panel of expert judges.

Each team has six minutes to pitch and demo their product — followed by an in-depth Q&A with the judges. If you make it to the final round, you’ll do it all over again — this time in front of a new set of judges. From that select group, one team will rise above the rest to become the TC Shenzhen Hardware Battlefield champ and claim the $25,000 prize.

Even if your team doesn’t win, you still reap big benefits. Hardware Battlefield participants receive invaluable exposure to the media, investors and other influencers. The event takes place in front of a live audience, and we also record the Battlefield on video and publish it on TechCrunch to a global audience.

Meet these low bars in order to qualify for Hardware Battlefield:

• Submit your application by 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 28
• You must have a minimally viable product to demo onstage
• Your product has received little, if any, press coverage to date
• Your product must be a hardware device or component

Time is running out. You have 24 hours left to take advantage of an opportunity to transform your business. Join us in Shenzhen, the hardware heartland. Apply to compete in TC Hardware Battlefield 2019 before the clock runs out at 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 28.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Hardware Battlefield at TC Shenzhen? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Tesorio, a startup that helps businesses aggregate and analyze their cash flow data, today announced that it has raised a $10 million Series A round led by Seattle’s Madrona Venture Group. Existing investors First Round Capital, Floodgate, Y Combinator, Fathom Capital and Fuel Capital. This brings Tesorio’s total funding to $17 million. Madrona’s Hope Cochran will join the company’s board.

The company is tackling an interesting market that is surprisingly underserved given that every company likely wants to be able to track its cash flow as closely as possible. In most companies, though, that’s still done with the help of Excel spreadsheets. The fact that Jeff Epstein, former CFO of Oracle; Ron Gill, former CFO of NetSuite; and Greg Henry, CFO of Couchbase and former SVP of Finance at ServiceNow all gave angle funding to Tesorio shows how big a problem this is.

“Billion-dollar companies are running their cashflow in Excel — and that’s real,” Tesorio co-founder and CEO Carlos Vega told me. “What that doesn’t allow you to do is use all that data that goes into that cashflow in a smart way. […] Imagine all of that could be connected and interconnected — and that’s basically what we’re building.”

Tesorio helps businesses aggregate all of their cash flow — in some ways, you can think of it as a Mint for businesses — and then runs its AI models over it to predict a company’s overall financial health. Current customers include the likes of Veeva Systems, Box, and WP Engine, who use the company’s systems to, for example, automate their accounts payable operations to understand when customers are likely to pay. While there are other tools that help you manage the overall workflow, Vega argues that Tesorio is different because it can pull in data from all of these disparate systems and create a cash flow forecast based on this.

“Many departments have systems of record to log things like accounting entries, bank info, billings, customer interactions, spend, etc,” Vega explained. “The exciting opportunity is to tie that data together dynamically so you can have a multifaceted view on the trajectory of your business (with a focus on the effects to cash flow) and then automate the levers that can help you impact cash.”

While the company didn’t disclose any revenue numbers, it did not that its revenue grew 4x year-over-year in 2018.

As Vega told me, it’s usually the financial teams and CFO’s that adopt Tesorio. The company focuses on bringing on companies with 100 to 3000 employees and it already has a number of international customers, too. In total, the platform has already analyzed $56 billion in payments, 10 million invoices and 5 million user activities. As will all machine learning services, every new transaction also helps to make its models more precise.

As usual, Tesorio will use the new funding to expand its product — with a special focus on adding integrations with other finance systems — and its expand its go-to-market initiatives.

Madrona’s Hope Cochran, who herself was a public company CFO during her time at Clearwire and King Digital, stressed the need for a service like this. “The ultimate financial metric for a company is Cash,” she writes in today’s announcement. “Not just the current balance, but the trajectory of the balance. In the vast majority of companies, this analysis is performed on a spreadsheet. One containing many links, often circular references, and pulling in data from multiple sources. The risk of an error, a break, is high. ”

Serverless technology offers developers a way to develop without thinking about the infrastructure resources required to run a program, but up until now it has mostly been limited to function-driven programming. CloudState, a new open source project from Lightbend, wants to change that by moving beyond functions.

Lightbend CTO Jonas Bonér believes this ability to abstract away infrastructure could extend beyond functions and triggers into a broader developer experience. “I think people sometimes [don’t distinguish] between serverless and Function as a Service. I think that’s actually cutting the technology short. What serverless really brings to the table is this completely new developer experience and operations experience by trying to automate as much as possible,” Bonér told TechCrunch.

He says that when he talks to customers, they are hankering for a more complete serverless developer experience that includes all parts of the program. “A lot of people say that I have this excellent use case for the current incarnation of serverless and Function as a Service, but the rest of my application doesn’t really work running there,” he said. That’s exactly what CloudState is trying to address.

Bonér is careful to point out that he’s not looking to replace function-driven programming. He only wants to augment it. CloudState takes advantage of some existing technologies like KNative, the open source project that is trying to bring together serverless and containerization, as well as gRPC, Akka Cluster, and GraalVM on Kubernetes.

He acknowledges that CloudState is still a work in progress, but he has the basic building blocks in place, and he’s hoping to use the power of open source to drive the development of this early-stage project. Today, it includes several key pieces — a specification outlining the goals of the project, a protocol to begin implementing it and a testing kit.

The goal here is to bring to fruition this broader vision of what serverless means where developers can just write code without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure where the program will run. It’s a bold approach, but as Bonér says, it’s still early days, and will take time and a community to really build this out.

Enjoy, the e-commerce startup led by former Apple VP of retail operations, Ron Johnson, has raised an additional $150 million in Series C funding from L Catterton’s new consumer technology platform, LCH Partners. The funds will be used to fuel Enjoy’s U.K. expansion and other international growth. The startup is also today launching a partnership with British mobile network operator EE, which will allow the company to serve over 80% of U.K. households by 2020.

The company announced the funding but not the size of the round. An SEC filing shows $150 million was offered, but only half had closed. However, a source familiar with the round confirmed $150 million had been raised.

The new growth funding brings Enjoy’s total raise to date to $350 million, following its May 2015 launch. Prior investors include Riverwood Capital, Stamos Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Highland Capital, and Oak Capital Management.

Having spent over a decade at Apple, Johnson is best known for pioneering the concept of Apple’s retail stores and Genius Bar. He previously held an executive position at Target as VP of Merchandising and, following Apple, had a less successful run as J.C. Penney’s CEO which led to his ouster. (Though in hindsight, it’s been argued that J.C. Penney should have just stuck with his plan, after all.)

With Silicon Valley-based Enjoy, Johnson combined the convenience of online shopping with the personal service that comes from shopping in a physical, brick-and-mortar store and the help you’d receive at Genius Bar, for example.

As Johnson explained around the time of launch, the goal was to figure out how to provide personal service to those who want to buy online.

“One of the observations from my time at Apple is that Apple makes the easiest to use products on the planet, but look at how busy the stores are with people asking questions and needing help. So what about the rest? How do you deliver help in this digital world we live in?,” he said, during an interview at TechCrunch Disrupt 2015.

Through partnerships with other companies, including AT&T, Sonos, Google, and now EE, Enjoy creates an online mobile store where customers can shop for devices and receive same-day delivery. They can also opt to have an Enjoy expert deliver the item and help them get set up free of charge.

Enjoy generates its revenue from its business partners, who pay to have their products sold through an online storefront. Enjoy then returns information like what sort of challenges customers face with their setups, and help to reduce calls to tech support while also increasing brand loyalty.

“One of the highlights of my retail career was creating a new channel for Apple customers, which was the Apple Retail Store,” said Ron Johnson, CEO and Co-Founder of Enjoy, in a statement. “Now I get to do it again by creating the mobile retail store for not just one company, but for many great companies around the world. As we look to drive the next phase of our growth, L Catterton was a natural choice as our partner, given their expertise in building consumer and technology brands on a global scale,” he said.

Including today’s expansion by way of its EE partnership, Enjoy now operates in more than 54 U.S. markets and covers more than 50% of the U.S. population, and will be offered in 11 U.K. markets, covering more than 60% of the population, by year-end. As of 2020, it will reach 80% of the U.K. population.

The company also plans to expand to at least one other country this year, and additional countries in 2020.

At a time when the industry appears to bet that AI will replace most human jobs, starting with the tens of millions currently residing in call centers, one startup is working to use the same technology to empower the jobs it is pegged to displace.

VoiceOps, a San Francisco-based startup, today announced it has raised $9 million in a Series A financing round led by Bain Capital Ventures. Existing investors Accel and Y Combinator also participated in the round. As part of the new fundraise, Ajay Agarwal of Bain Capital Ventures is joining VoiceOps’ board of directors, the startup said.

VoiceOps works with companies to help them coach and train their call center representatives. The idea is simple: Sales people are often not putting their best foot forward when they make the pitches. There is some oversight in what they should be presenting in their calls and what they end up pitching.

That’s where VoiceOps comes in. It claims to have built one of the world’s biggest datasets of sales behavior. It works with companies to understand what they are trying to sell and how they wish to go about it, Ethan Barhydt, co-founder and CEO of VoiceOps told TechCrunch in an interview.

Co-founders of VoiceOps Ethan Barhydt, left, and Nate Becker pose for a picture. Their third co-founder, Daria Evdokimova, who previously serves as the startup’s CEO, is no longer involved in day to day operations.

The startup then uses an AI-powered system to analyze and transcribe the sales calls and evaluates how often sales people adhered to the guideline their managers had set.

After the analysis, VoiceOps shares insight with the client. This helps the company quickly understand exactly what gaps they need to address. Call centers make thousands of calls each day. It is hard to track exactly what improvements or changes someone needs, Barhydt explained.

Barhydt likened VoiceOps’s approach to how self driving car companies are improving their AI models. “Self driving car companies take millions of images, where they have people manually label the cars in the stop signs, in the street lights, on the road, and then they feed that data into these models, and train the models to be able to do this accurately at scale. So we are doing the same thing. But instead of doing it on images, we’re doing it on conversation. The underlying technical problem that we have to solve is how do you take these complex unstructured conversations and turn it into structured data,” he said.

VoiceOps declined to share the number of clients it has, but said its customers today run some of the largest call centers in insurance, real estate, travel, and insurance businesses, making as many as 50,000 calls each in a day. Additionally, the startup said its clients are able to see their conversion rate improve between 5% to 20% in the first 60 days itself, generating tens of million of additional revenue.

In the last 12 months, Barhydt said VoiceOps’ solutions have helped several of its customers hit historic highs. “Early customers who spent $50k with us last year have 5X’d their spend to $250k after seeing stellar results,” he said. Education group Penn Foster, one of VoiceOps’ clients, is seeing the best rate of conversation in its more than 100 years of existence, he said.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Bain Capital Ventures’ Agarwal said the startup will use the fresh capital to scale its product offerings, hire more engineers, and attract more customers. “This is a company that we we think will grow at extraordinary rates — four to five times kind of growth. The kind of momentum that they have demonstrated in the past six months, we want to see it continue and grow that over the course of the next year,” he said.

VoiceOps, which currently serves customers in the U.S., intends to focus on expanding its footprint within the nation. “There is a conception that all the call center jobs are going outside of the U.S., but if you look at the data, call center jobs are growing about five percent year-over-year,” VoiceOps’ Barhydt said.

According to official U.S. government figures, there are about 3.5 million Americans who work in this space today. VoiceOps wants to help them. “When reps receive effective coaching, their calls improve, they hit quota more often, and they make more money,” Barhydt said.

The BBC — aka, the British Broadcasting Corporation, aka the Beeb, aka Auntie — is getting into the voice assistant game.

The Guardian reports the plan to launch an Alexa rival, which has been given the working title ‘Beeb’, and will apparently be light on features given the Corp’s relatively slender developer resources vs major global tech giants.

The BBC’s own news site says the digital voice assistant will launch next year without any proprietary hardware to house it. Instead the corporation is designing the software to work on “all smart speakers, TVs and mobiles”.

Why is a publicly funded broadcaster ploughing money into developing an AI when the market is replete with commercial offerings — from Amazon’s Alexa to Google’s Assistant, Apple’s Siri and Samsung’s Bixby to name a few? The intent is to “experiment with new programmes, features and experiences without someone else’s permission to build it in a certain way”, a BBC spokesperson told BBC news.

The corporation is apparently asking its own staff to contribute voice data to help train the AI to understand the country’s smorgasbord of regional accents.

“Much like we did with BBC iPlayer, we want to make sure everyone can benefit from this new technology, and bring people exciting new content, programmes and services — in a trusted, easy-to-use way,” the spokesperson added. “This marks another step in ensuring public service values can be protected in a voice-enabled future.”

While at first glance the move looks reactionary and defensive, set against the years of dev already ploughed into cutting edge commercial voice AIs, the BBC has something those tech giant rivals lack: Not just regional British accents on tap — but easy access to a massive news and entertainment archive to draw on to design voice assistants that could serve up beloved personalities as a service.

Imagine being able to summon the voice of Tom Baker, aka Doctor Who, to tell you what the (cosmic) weather’s like — or have the Dad’s Army cast of characters chip in to read out your to-do list. Or get a summary of the last episode of The Archers from a familiar Ambridge resident.

Or what about being able to instruct ‘Beeb’ to play some suitably soothing or dramatic sound effects to entertain your kids?

On one level a voice AI is just a novel delivery mechanism. The BBC looks to have spotted that — and certainly does not lack for rich audio content that could be repackaged to reach its audience on verbal command and extend its power to entertain and delight.

When it comes to rich content, the same cannot be said of the tech giants who have pioneered voice AIs.

There have been some attempts to force humor (AIs that crack bad jokes) and/or shoehorn in character — largely flat-footed. As well as some ethically dubious attempts to pass off robot voices as real. All of which is to be expected, given they’re tech companies not entertainers. Dev not media is their DNA.

The BBC is coming at the voice assistant concept from the other way round: Viewing it as a modern mouthpiece for piping out more of its programming.

So while Beeb can’t hope to compete at the same technology feature level as Alexa and all the rest, the BBC could nonetheless show the tech giants a trick or two about how to win friends and influence people.

At the very least it should give their robotic voices some much needed creative competition.

It’s just a shame the Beeb didn’t tickle us further by christening its proto AI ‘Auntie’. A crisper two syllable trigger word would be hard to utter…

Yelp announced this morning that it will start allowing users to tailor their search results and homepage based on their personal preferences.

In other words, if you’re vegetarian, or if you’re parent who’s usually looking for kid-friendly restaurants, you won’t have to reenter that information every time you do a search. Instead, you can enter it once and Yelp will prioritize those results moving forward.

“In the history of Yelp, this is the first time two people searching for the same thing from the same context are going to see different, personalized results,” said Head of Consumer Product Akhil Ramesh.

To do this, users select the “Personalize your experience” option, then choose options around dietary restrictions (whether they’re vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and so on), their lifestyle (whether they’re parents, car owners or pet owners), their accessibility needs (wheelchair access, gender neutral bathrooms), the types of food they prefer and other interests (like bookstores or date nights).

Once you’ve made your selections, those preferences will start affecting the search results you see. The personalization should be obvious because the results will be identified as having “many vegetarian options” or “because you like Chinese food.” The homepage will also start highlighting locations that it thinks you would like.

In some ways, this feels like a long overdue move, particularly when so many other popular apps and websites are already heavily personalized. Shy is Yelp finally adopting this approach now?

For one thing, Ramesh pointed to a growing interest in different diets. For another, he said, “We have years and years of unstructured, expressive, quality content, and this content is representative of a real experience with a business. Over the last few years our machine learning and AI capabilities have grown immensely, and what that’s allowed us to do is build really useful features on top of the high quality content that we have.”

Ramesh emphasized that Yelp will focus on using your explicitly shared preferences to shape your results, as opposed to feeding all your behavior into an algorithm. After all, he said, “any machine learning algorithm is going to have tons of biases.”

He described this approach as “the human way”: If you were having a conversation with a person, “You wouldn’t try to assume what the person did over the weekend. You would just ask the person and have an open conversation.”

At the same time, he said there are times when using your general behavior in the app to influence the results could be helpful, so Ramesh said, “We’re trying to figure out how to balance those aspects.”

He also noted that your preferences could change depending on timing and context: You might abandon a certain diet, or you might go out for a meal without your kids. So you can adjust your preferences at any time — or conversely, dive more deeply into one of them by selecting a list from the homepage.

Asked how this affects Yelp’s ad business, Ramesh said it won’t influence the ads you see initially, but the ads will come with similar “Because you liked X” messages tied to your preferences..

“I wouldn’t be surprised if which advertiser we show will be you based on your preferences [eventually], but there’s no ETA
 on that,” he added.

Carbon has been a kind of shining beacon in the world of 3D printing. In June, the company raised $260 million, bringing its valuation just shy of $2.4 billion. The company’s rapid growth is thanks in no small part to some high-profile partnerships, led by big names like Adidas and Riddell.

This morning, Carbon announced another partnership that’s a no-brainer in the wake of those sneaker and helmet deals. The company is teaming up with bicycle manufacturer Specialized for a 3D-printed bike seat.

“Carbon and Specialized share a mission to challenge the acceptable, create the extraordinary, and ultimately make products that enable people to push the limits of what’s possible,” Carbon CEO Joseph DeSimone said in a release tied to the announcement. “Our partnership with Specialized represents not only a breakthrough in bike saddle technology, but also our companies’ shared commitment to drive meaningful change by making products that improve human health and well-being.”

Certainly there’s room for a 3D-printed breakthrough in the world of bike saddles. The issue may be less pressing than what the NFL is currently dealing with on the traumatic brain front, but Carbon makes a pretty compelling argument for how its technology can be put to good use here.

The S-Works Power Saddle utilizes the same lattice-structured Elastomeric Polyurethane as the Adidas FutureCraft sneakers and Riddell SpeedFlex helmet. Per Carbon:

Carbon Digital Light SynthesisTM (DLSTM) technology made it possible to develop a lattice design that enables the saddle to rebound quickly, giving riders the experience of having a ‘suspension’ for their sit bones. The saddle not only disperses pressure, but also significantly improves breathability. Ultimately, our innovation is designed to result in less pain and fewer injuries for riders, leading to better health and performance.

It’s easy to imagine the companies utilizing the technology to create a more bespoke experience, tailored to riders’ bodies. For now, however, they’re focused on more scalable manufacturing, with the seats arriving at some point next year.